The advent of Internet culture has lead to a peculiar kind of self-creation: the kind done purely for personal gratification. Using the social media sites we willingly subscribe to against others–some youth have built up their online presence by “gaming the system.” In other words, studying and exploiting the popular “reblogs,” “hashtags”, and “likes” on Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram to make themselves Internet celebrities and amass thousands of followers with minimal work.
This project explored ways of manipulating social media to your own benefit— using satire and humor to look at how that “maximum profit, minimal work” dynamic affects social media and those who participate in it.
These infographics were created to teach people how to become popular internet personalities using the three most popular social media sites of 20-30 year olds.
My next output was a video, basically turning the infographics into a an audio-visual experience to showcase the information in a more entertaining way.
Lastly, I designed and coded a website to house the outputs I'd created so far. I was inspired by a few very inspirational one-page scrolling sites--so I built something simple and colorful, and all on one page.
As a final output, I decided on an instagram photo-frame. All my other work focused on sites like Tumblr and Facebook as a way to get famous--sites that rely on communication instead of images. (Although Tumblr is a photo-sharing site, the most popular people I've seen on the site use it as a blog.) The photo-frame idea allowed me to encourage picture taking for the internet and as a frame to focus attention where the uploader wants.
